SNA on Savings Groups in Sub-Saharan Africa

The following link describes dependence in various African countries on savings groups as a means to finance important needs. Some microfinance institutions are also leveraging this concept by making loans to groups of people rather than to individuals. These small microloan and savings groups are essentially networks, usually of women, in developing countries. It occurred to me that a social network analysis of these kinds of groups might be interesting to see if there were any structural commonalities between those groups that had better repayment rates or used their funds to generate higher returns. I'd hypothesize that groups with stronger ties may be more successful at working together to use funds more efficiently. It would be interesting to ask the women in the group to rank how well they know the others in the group or to ask them to assign a confidential ranking based on how close their friendship is with other women to get a sense of how strong the bonds are between members of the group.

Furthermore, if we were able to do a social network of several small villages where, for example, local women had a savings group, we could also see if the returns on their use of funds correlates with the average Eigenvector or closeness scores for the group. This would be logical because the better connected women are to others in their community, perhaps the better able they are to sell goods or provide services to their community with the funds that their group gives them. I'd imagine that this could also be used to analyze individual sales people in a village or in a souq to see if having a robust social network in the community translates to financial gains for the business. It would then be interesting to weigh the strength of the social network versus other buyer care-abouts like price, quality, etc. in determining how strongly consumer behavior is influenced by social networks. While I initially thought of this idea based on an interest in developing markets, I'd assume that the takeaways could well be applicable and relevant to businesses in the developed world also, and that could be a really meaningful insight for marketing professionals everywhere.

Ravi